Fernando Pessoa’s metacritics, or the rationalist tiredness

Abstract

In the first decades of the last century, the rationalist tiredness arising from a western thought steeped in positivist slogans, the accelerated process of industrialization, the desire for order and progress, all of this falls on the individual under the distrust of an apparent social order. This discomfort of the subject of modernity, Unbehagen, as it is in the original title of Sigmund Freud's Civilization and its discontents, is also a bit of what Eduardo Lourenço would call melancholy, with regard to Portuguese society at the time. Fernando Pessoa will incorporate, through his heteronyms, this fragmented subject in a secularized world and, making use of the intellectual instruments of civilization, such as philosophy and technology, elaborates what we call a metacriticism.